Stallman addresses this in his original post. He says that he wishes Canonical would take the fact that people have apparently done this as proof that it's an unwanted feature and remove it themselves; he adds that it's not enough to add a "disable feature" option when you suspect people will be too apathetic or too ignorant to turn it off.
I wonder if this situation won't be a bit of a litmus test for Stallman and the FSF. If Canonical says "no, we aren't changing this" does the FSF counter by forking Ubuntu and removing that feature? That response is at the root of Stallman's four freedoms. Or do they simply tell people to avoid Ubuntu?
Why didn't gNewSense just fork Debian? All they'd need to do would be disable the 'non-free' repo and block the offending firmware blobs. Instead they have to fork a fork of Debian and have more work on their plate stripping things out.
